Annotating paper documents with a pen is a familiar and indispensable activity across a wide variety of business and educational environments. Annotating a document is the act of “marking up” or placing critical and explanatory notes and remarks on the document. These notes and remarks may by textual, graphical, or both.
As pen-based computing devices such as pen computers, Tablet PCs and personal digital assistants (PDAs) become increasingly popular among consumers, the ability to annotate digital documents becomes highly useful and important. Pen-based computing devices utilize an electronic pen (called a stylus) instead of a keyboard for input. Pens are used for input because in many situations the computing devices are too small to incorporate a keyboard. In addition, there are numerous situations where a pen together with a notepad is more convenient for the user that a keyboard. These pen-based computing devices generally have special operating systems that support handwriting recognition, which allows a user to interface with the device by writing on a screen or on a tablet instead of typing on a keyboard.
Despite the availability and usefulness of pen-based computing devices, when it comes to reading and annotating documents the majority of people still prefer pen and paper. One key reason is that pen and paper offer a reader an easy way for the reader to sketch unstructured or freeform notes and drawings in response to document content.
Notwithstanding the advantages offered by paper documents during the annotation process, digital documents and annotations tend to be more flexible than their paper counterparts. For example, digital documents can be more easily edited and adapted to conform to different display sizes than paper documents. In addition, while annotated paper documents often end up in the trash bin, digital annotations can persist throughout the lifetime of a digital document. Moreover, digital documents and annotations can be more easily filtered, organized, and shared.
Because of this flexibility, digital documents can be used in diverse environments. For example, a single digital document may be read is several different formats, displayed on a variety of devices, and presented within a variety of window sizes. The digital document may be edited, combined with other documents, and may even dynamically adapt its contents. Thus, unlike a paper document, a digital document generally does not have a permanent layout.
This lack of a permanent layout presents a significant technological challenge when considering freeform digital ink annotations on a digital document. Each time a digital document adapts to a new layout, for instance, the associated annotations must also be adapted. In other words, when a digital document is edited or displayed on different devices or in different window sizes, the layout of the digital document changes to adapt to the new situation. Any “digital ink” annotations made on the digital document must likewise be adapted (or “reflowed”) to the new layout conditions.
In order to support reflowing freeform digital ink annotations, three problems must be solved: First, the annotations that the reader is creating must be recognized and classified as one of several types of annotations (e.g. “underline,” “circle,” “margin comment,” etc.). Next, each annotation must be anchored to the particular place in the document where the annotation belongs. Finally, if the underlying document's layout changes at some point in the future, existing annotations on the document must be properly reflowed so they continue to agree with the reader's original intent.
Historically, much of the research and development effort associated with digital ink has centered on handwriting recognition. The digital ink annotation process and system disclosed herein, however, does not use handwriting recognition. This is because it is possible to reflow digital ink annotations simply by knowing that they are or are not handwriting (which is a high-level classification task), without knowing specifically what they say (which is a fine-grained recognition task).
More recently, several approaches have used ink shape recognition to support a variety of sketch-based interfaces. These approaches have used heuristics or machine learning techniques to recognize a set of shapes or gestures. However, when considering their use for support of digital ink annotation, one shortcoming with these approaches is that they do not anchor ink strokes with an independent context such as an underlying document, and thus cannot modify the user's ink in response to changes in this context.
There is at least one approach that applies shape recognition to digital ink annotations, then use this to adapt freeform ink annotations to constrained changes in viewing conditions (such as changing the font size in a document). This approach originally tried simple heuristics to perform recognition, however this was found to be insufficient. Subsequently, this approach relied on machine learning techniques for recognition, and “super-local” anchoring for associating parts of ink strokes with individual context features. One problem with this approach has been that it does not include manual classification. Manual classification should be included in a system such that the user is allowed to make manual selections when the automatic classification, anchoring, or reflow fails or is not feasible. Also, “super-local” anchoring (e.g. where parts of individual ink strokes are separately anchored to document context features) is appropriate for adapting annotations to the kind of constrained changes in viewing conditions that this approach was concerned with, however, it is insufficient for support of fully unconstrained reflow of digital ink annotations, since the transformation of an annotation must take into account all ink strokes involved in the annotation and all features in an annotation's anchor context.
Therefore, there exists a need for a document processing system and method that overcomes the aforementioned problems and limitations. In particular, a system and method are needed that preserve the intent and visual meaning of digital ink annotations whenever an original document is modified.